Giles Coren eats the best lunch in the world

In a little town an hour from Madrid sits the greatest meal on earth. Giles Coren has a revelation in Pedraza

March 14, 2016

From The Times, May 23, 2015

I remember: a dusty road; white walls; sheer blue sky; the terracotta tiles of the restaurant’s second floor; big square windows on to the sun-bleached square outside and the darkness and cool of the room; a whole baby lamb; no, half a lamb, split down the middle and laid in a long oval dish, also of terracotta, baked bare in a bread oven; the deep amber of the skin, its crackle, the whiteness of the flesh and the sweetness of the inner organs – kidney, heart, pancreas, thymus, still attached to the bones; lechal lamb, it was, which meant milk-fed, from the flocks in the fields that surrounded the village; green leaves dressed with lemon; no menu, no alternatives to the Easter parade of unweaned paschal child; the heat of the sun outside; the silhouettes of my old mate Bob and the two girls from Madrid who had brought us here; otherwise, just the name … Pedraza.

Out of it I have built my most succulent, moody, melodramatic food memory. My touchstone, lodestone, guiding … thing. The meal I wheel out in answer to almost every boring bloody question ever put to me by boring foodie buggers:

What is the best meal you have ever eaten?

What are you looking for in a restaurant?

What do you measure each new restaurant against?

What would be your death-row meal?

If you could eat meat only once a year, what would it be?

What do you consider good value?

Why does “local” matter?

To all of these, for the sake of saying something, I reply, “The milk-fed lamb at a very old restaurant on the main square in Pedraza, whose name I do not remember.”

In general, only the most pompous critics deal in absolutes. It’s most of them, of course. But it isn’t me. I don’t have a favourite restaurant, dish, ingredient, national cuisine, era, style, course, soup, pizza topping, burger bun, pudding, wine, coffee, waiter or dining room. I just write about them, that’s all. I’m not interested in ranking things. But if people absolutely insist on hearing about my “best ever”, then I usually tell them about Pedraza. And I elaborate in the hope of boring them into submission.

I always dreamt of Spain, I tell them. But I was too timid to travel. At 14, I read Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and his hammy caricature of Spain before the civil war burnt itself on my impressionable brain. I dreamt of walking the hot, dusty roads alone, “brown as an apostle”. Of sleeping under olive trees in the shade of a donkey, cutting chunks of rough salchichón with my hunting knife and chewing at a stale loaf given to me by the farmer’s wife I had handsomely rogered the night before in return for a pallet of straw and a cup of flinty local wine.

But I never did it. I just went back to boarding school to cry and masturbate and worry about exams. And then I read Ernest Hemingway and my dream of Spain morphed into a thing of bullfights and bars, heiresses with “curves like the hull of a racing yacht”, rioja squirted mouthwards from wineskins while fishing in the mountains, getting a bollock shot off in the war … But in reality I just went to Oxford and then into the family business. And here I am.

My old mate Bob, on the other hand, flunked out of school. So then off he went to Spain, alone – like those towering flunkers Ernest and Laurie – and reinvented himself: learnt the language, followed the bulls, went out with the girls, came back and did an A level in it, then a degree, then a doctorate. Became Dr Robert Goodwin of University College London, expert in the Golden Age of Spain with particular reference to the representation of food in art and literature.

And by visiting him there every couple of years I did gradually start to nudge into the nebulous literary Spain of my imagination. It started with brief trips to see him in my middle twenties, to Seville, Jerez and Sanlúcar de Barrameda. A couple of fiestas, a lot of sherry, ham and seafood, a lot of bullfights, sitting up in the cheap seats with two packs of Ducados, sweating, wreathed in that tarry tobacco fug, trying to make sense of all the death, and then a lot of standing at the edge of bars at four in the morning while Bob talked to chirpy, squat little people called Pepe and Alfonso and Carmelita, not understanding a word, wondering when I’d be allowed to go home to bed.

The trips were always pretty good, but swelled hugely in significance in the telling when I got home, as travellers’ stories do. And as I began writing about food I started to use the Spanish example quite liberally to give my writing the dash and patina of travel and worldly experience.

Could it possibly be as good as I remembered? Can any meal live up to hallowed memory? I’ve referred to that meal in probably a dozen reviews since – have I been lying?

I began to take as my restaurant-judging benchmarks certain principles that were considered basic in Spain but which were quite unknown in London in the 1990s: that local ingredients should be the linchpin; that menus are unnecessary but if you do have one, it should be short; that if you want good fish you have to pay for it; that a procession of small plates for sharing is more congenial, invigorating and sexy than a big pile of scran all to yourself; and that after a single ice-cold Cruzcampo to loosen your palate, cold, dry manzanilla is king.

I tooled around Spain on and off for years in Bob’s shadow, feeling on good days like Sancho Panza – fat little hairy retainer to the tall, pale gentleman living out his fantasy – and on bad days like Robert Cohn, pugnacious, angry little Jew to his … Well, you’ve either read The Sun Also Rises or you haven’t.

And then came a whole month in Madrid in the spring of 2002, sharing a rented flat not far from the bullring at Las Ventas in order to go to the corridas of the Feria de San Isidro pretty much every day. And then every night after the bulls, the tapas walk, the beer, then sherry, then small hours gin-and-tonic sessions. And in the morning, the hangover, Bob off to the library, me working on my novel and then lunch, siesta and the bulls again. Really quite Hemingway-like. Except with the novel being bad and there not being a homoerotic thing going on. At all. Nothing even remotely gay. Just bullfights and sherry.

And then these two plump girls we’d hooked up with, who liked their food (and everyone else’s), said there was a place a few miles up country in a medieval village of no more than 400 inhabitants, where at weekends they did a lechal lamb which had to be tasted to be believed. And so one Saturday morning they picked us up and we drove out to Pedraza and it was …

… Well, just as I described at the top of this piece. And it soon bedded down in conversation and in print as The Best Meal I Have Ever Had.

So imagine how worried I was when a plan was hatched for me to go back there and eat it again.

Could it possibly be as good as I remembered? Were they still doing the lamb? Was the place still there? Can any meal live up to hallowed memory? I’ve referred to that meal in probably a dozen reviews since – have I been lying?

I called Bob and asked if he wanted to go back there with me.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ve got a book out; I’ll come if you use the trip to plug it.”

“What’s it called?” I asked.

“Spain,” he said.

“Not what’s it about. What’s it called?”

“Spain,” he said again. “Spain: the Centre of the World 1519-1682.”

And it is. And David Starkey says it is “history as it should be but so rarely is”. So what better person to have travelling back into Spanish history with you for a meal? Than Bob, I mean. Not Starkey. Dear Christ, not Starkey.

Bob called back a bit later to say he had looked at Pedraza’s website and that it was either a place called La Olma or a place called El Soportal, but he wasn’t certain.

“Do you remember how hungover we were that day?” he said. “In fact, do you remember how hung over we were that whole month? I’m not even 100 per cent certain it was Pedraza.”

But I was, so we tossed a coin and settled on El Soportal. Flew out on the Friday to Madrid, picked up a hire car and drove out to Segovia to spend the night. Pedraza is small, we reckoned, and wouldn’t support two nights out as well as a lunch. So we tapassed a little around Segovia, which is fine for bars but is no Madrid, Seville or Barcelona. They give you a fingerful of free grub with each drink to keep you from falling over, but nobody’s changing lives.

And then, after a lie-in, coffee and a bad breakfast in the grim basement eating room of a miserable marble five-star, we dived into the car and, with Bob navigating and me at the wheel, drove out of the city, into the beautiful basin of the Sierra de Guadarrama – the wide plains still green in May, fringed by juniper and Spanish broom – inspired by the ghosts of Sancho and the Don once again, with a Volvo from Hertz instead of the horse Rocinante and Pancho’s dappled donkey, but tilting at shadows just the same. Charging across the same plains, with the same determination to recreate the glories of a mythic past. But would El Soportal turn out to be the towering giant of my imagination, or just a crappy old windmill?

“So this is basically La Mancha, isn’t it?” I said to Bob, coming out of my Quixotic reverie and regarding the wide pastures before me.

“No,” he said. “La Mancha is south of Madrid. This is north. It’s completely different. Not even remotely similar.”

Pedraza was even more beautiful than I remembered: a tiny medieval village perched on a hill, surrounded by lush meadows full of sheep and cattle, and then all around it the blue mountains of the sierra. We parked in a field because no cars are allowed in the main square – nor seemingly any signage, plastic, lighting or any evidence of the 21st century – and walked back up into village.

“I remember this,” said Bob. “The girls dropped us and went to park. We went in and got the table.”

From the cool of the bar the blazing, ageless square had the look of a Mexican village in a spaghetti western, breathless before the carnage.

The square was wide, dry, white, quiet, Moorish, dusty, under the screaming blue cloche of the sky. El Soportal was on the shady side, colonnaded like a cloister. Bourgeois Madrileños in pastels sat outside awaiting lunch. Bob and I went in and ordered beers at a small pewter counter. A guy in a white shirt silently poured them and laid down some rough chunks of warm chorizo. From the cool of the bar the blazing, ageless square had the look of a Mexican village in a spaghetti western, breathless before the carnage.

We took some photos. I had worried that by booking in advance, saying what I was doing, and setting up a camera with lights, we might get them overexcited, spook the staff, attract too much attention, shatter the illusion. I thought of the two parts of Don Quixote: Part I, in which he rides out into a modern world he imagines to be that of the chivalric past; and Part II, published a decade later, in which he rides out into a world that has read the first part and so plays along with his delusion, and mocks him. Was this to be my own Part II? Were my dreams and self-belief to be publicly mocked?

No. Pedraza could not have given less of a damn.

So after the photos and the beer we went upstairs. The room was as I remembered: wooden beams, tiled floors, white linen on the tables, big windows, major chiaroscuro. And there, in the corner, which I had not remembered, was the bread oven, tended by an old man with a moustache and a long shovel, and inside it, maybe 16 quarters of lamb in their dishes, cooking slowly.

I had remembered halves, but quarters would do. We asked about the inner organs but they said we would see only the kidneys. We asked about the cooking: three hours, low heat, no additions. The juices we saw were just what came out of the meat.

We ordered a rioja from the huge list of wines priced between €17 and €21 (£12-£15). We said no to the starters. The clock ticked on the wall. The shadow of the church tower nudged across the far side of the plaza mayor.

A young waitress in a white shirt with a small nose, long eyelashes and clean auburn hair tied back in a ponytail, laid a large oval dish before us. The skin did not look as golden as I had remembered, nor the flesh as pale. I tore away a portion. I forked up some flesh. It yielded bold, savoury fluids and a rich, carnal scent. But it was a little chewy. Undercooked? Did it need another hour for the cells truly to crack and the lost liquids to be reabsorbed?

I went for some fat. It waxed my mouth with a mild, meaty butter and I all but gasped with the pleasure of it. My next mouthful of meat I dressed with an equal quantity of the fat and this time all my Iberian yesterdays came rolling back. I remembered in that instant why I had asked Chris Galvin, the great British chef, to roast 12 Romney Marsh lambs for my wedding breakfast – it was because of this. I tore and gobbled and mopped the rich, soupy juices with frantic rippings of soft, white bread.

And then I found the kidneys, nestling in their visceral fat, like little fairy cakes of barely born bollock. They were beyond … Look, this is silly. There is nothing more boring than a man you’ve never met twatting on about how good his lunch was. Or even a man you have met. It measured up, okay? It bloody did. I travelled back through 13 years to see if I was lying the first time, and I wasn’t. The mountains, the plains, the village, the plaza mayor, El Soportal, the first cold beer, the cheap rioja, the very lamb of God itself (for this is the lamb they were surely thinking of) cooked low and long at arm’s length from a fire of wood. This is truly it. This is the deal.

So then, I have told you. And if you die without going for lunch in Pedraza, then you will have only yourself to blame. Indeed, you would have to be pretty damn stupid not to go twice.